ABC's Michelle Guthrie among returning expats snubbed by Australian companies

Before the ABC managing director role came along, Michelle Guthrie always thought her path back to Australia would be as a non-executive director.

At a time of digital disruption and media industry transformation, Guthrie was confident her experience as a senior executive in Asia at tech giant Google, as chief executive of Star TV in Hong Kong and working for BSkyB in London and Foxtel in Sydney would put her in good stead for a board position.

She was keen for her youngest daughter to finish school in Australia so, while still at Google, she started interviewing for roles on Australian boards. The problem was no one would give her a gig.

"I felt like I was adapting my leadership style and my negotiation as I went ... I don't see that happen very much in Australia," says ABC managing director Michelle Guthrie. Peter Braig

"I must admit I found that trying to get non-exec director roles in Australia very difficult," Guthrie says in an interview at ABC's headquarters in inner-Sydney Ultimo.

"One of the questions I would be asked is, 'Who do you know in Canberra?' My answer would be 'Well, I know a lot of people in China, in Indonesia, in India, and I've built those networks over time and I assume I will be able to do that in Canberra as well.'"

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At the time, Guthrie was still based in Singapore and Australian companies weren't accommodating. She found that puzzling as she had been offered, and taken up, positions on the boards of Auckland Airport and Swedish media company Modern Times Group. Neither company had a problem with where she was based or her lack of local market knowledge.

"I’d only ever been to New Zealand once before but Auckland Airport looked at my experience and said, 'We’ve already got people who understand New Zealand and airports and infrastructure, but growth in passengers is coming from Asia. We want to understand the future for transportation, the future consumer experience and what that means in terms of technology and digital,'" Guthrie says.

Guthrie is nursing a cold when we meet and admits to preferring the relative anonymity of a Google executive role in Singapore to the media scrutiny and public profile that comes with being the ABC chief.

Despite this, she has agreed to the interview with AFRBOSS magazine because she wants to speak up about an issue that is concerning many credentialled Australians returning home: the undervaluing of overseas experience by local boards and executive teams.

Not so warm welcome ... there is a view that the overseas experience of returning expats is undervalued by Australian boards and executive teams. Louie Douvis

PwC estimates that by 2030 there will be 1.35 million Australians living overseas, with a third of those in Asia. Most Australian expatriates have moved overseas for work and, according to PwC, almost half return home within five years. However, many find it difficult to make the transition.

'I don't know anyone who comes back and has an easy landing'

"It’s very hard to come back," says Derek Youdale, who spent 15 years in London, Glasgow and New York working for JPMorgan Chase, where he played a role in seven mergers within a decade during the turbulent period around the Global Financial Crisis.

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"I don’t know anyone who comes back and has an easy landing."

Youdale found his re-entry point in 2011, starting as ANZ’s technology chief operating officer. He is now director of business intelligence at Telstra but initially he had trouble finding the right role. "One of the biggest challenges is coming back without a network on the ground," he says.

Another executive, who prefers to remain anonymous, held a senior role at a FTSE 100 company for 14 years based in Europe and the US and worked on multibillion-dollar mergers and managed the fallout from a major global cyber attack. Yet she was told by a local recruiter to emphasise what she had done in Australia before she left.

The difficulties faced by expats returning to the local workforce could be deterring or delaying their homecomings and depriving the economy of much-needed expertise at a time when big global competitors are moving into the Australian market and companies are being buffeted by rapid technological change.

"Companies are coming under pressure," says Adrian Turner, head of Data61, the federal government’s top data science and technology agency. "Boards are being forced to play defence as global companies come and compete in our territory. They need people who understand global markets and how to organise and to move fast in order to be the first to scale."

Turner worked in Silicon Valley for 18 years, founding two successful digital businesses – Mocana, which develops security software to protect fighter jets, helicopters and commercial aircraft; and Borondi, a technology-focused investment company modelled on Warren Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway. When he was approached by CSIRO to set up Data61, Turner declined the offer three times before agreeing to take on the job.

"We have to get senior people in Australian companies, in management teams and on boards, valuing overseas experience," says Advance board member Mike Cannon-Brookes snr. Nic Walker

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He says that over the past three years there has been a positive shift in attitudes to overseas experience from boards as well as management teams, which is being driven by necessity as big global companies take the local market by surprise.

"Competition is coming from left field and companies here are struggling to cope. They are looking for people with overseas experience to come up with new strategies."

But this is taking time to filter through the market. PwC released a report this year with Advance, an organisation set up in 2002 to work with the government to leverage the experience and connections of Australians living overseas. It found there was evidence "the underutilisation of expats who have returned to Australia is costing the country in terms of potential economic growth".

Valuing experience

Advance board member Mike Cannon-Brookes says over coffee in Sydney: "We have to get senior people in Australian companies, in management teams and on boards, valuing overseas experience."

Elizabeth Proust says local networks are important and, thanks to technology, should not be difficult to maintain while living overseas. Dominic Lorrimer

"As a result, people in Australia are worried about taking overseas assignments because they don’t know how they will get back again. To me that’s completely wrong. It’s about the opportunity to broaden experience."

When it comes to boards, Cannon-Brookes believes every company should have a director "who understands modern technology and how to use it and someone who has lived and worked overseas".

"If you look at the ASX 200 it's hard to find that on the boards," he says. "There seems to be a view that if you have taken the board to Silicon Valley once a year you’re up to date, but that’s not the case."

Need for networks

Elizabeth Proust, chair of the Australian Institute of Company Directors, says local networks are important and should be increasingly easy to maintain while living overseas. She says she has met people who have not kept up their networks or maintained membership of professional associations while they are offshore, often because they say they were too busy.

"I wonder [about] the extent to which they keep up their networks while they are away. With social media and email, that is no longer an excuse. You need to keep up your networks, especially if you want to get on boards."

"We’re so far away from everywhere and so we are seen as different, but we’re in a globalised world," he says.

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"In the next 20 to 30 years the majority of the wealth in the world will be north of here. We are the best-positioned Western democracy because of geography. Chinese people want education, overseas travel, services, and we can provide these things. We really need returnees with 10, 20, 30 years’ experience offshore and we need them on boards."

Guthrie agrees there needs to be a significant change in the ways Australian companies approach board and senior management appointments. As we walk out of the ABC boardroom she gestures to the wall of photographs of former ABC managing directors – all middle-aged, white men. With a smile, she points to herself and sings the famous Sesame Street lyric: "One of these things is not like the others."

Embracing diversity

To change the mindset in Australia, Guthrie says, "the challenge is about really embracing diversity of experience, backgrounds and upbringings and different ways of working".

"I found that operating in Asia, there is no common Asian experience," she says. "How you work in India is very different to how you work in Singapore, Japan or Korea. I felt like I was adapting my leadership style and my negotiation as I went. And I don't see that happen very much in Australia. I do think being able to include everybody at the table is really important, and making sure we get the best talent and the most diverse. There's not one style of leadership, success or way of doing things."

Guthrie says spending time in Japan, China, Indonesia and India and also in the US, with both Google and News Corp, gave her a strong sense of the importance of mobile in content delivery. "You see trends and [can make a judgment on] how it’s likely to play out [in Australia]," she says. "When you see the rise in the importance of mobile across Asia, you realise that mobile content delivery and consumption is going to be massive."

Guthrie says working for an organisation such as Google helped her become "less afraid" of the global tech giants. "I saw while they were great at some things, they also needed partnerships around content and I saw there were opportunities to work together."

Guthrie and Turner, as it happened, had remarkably smooth returns to Australia. Guthrie puts her scoring the coveted ABC role down to "incredible luck around the timing", while Turner says there is a growing recognition of the need for more international experience, which is driving recruiters to look outside the local market.

Serafina Maiorano, chief executive of Advance, says returning Australians are often risk-takers. "They are fast-paced with experience managing global teams. It is important for Australia to value this overseas experience, not fear it."

The development of alternative supplies of critical minerals, as well as other joint efforts by Australia and the United States to address Chinese influence in the region, will dominate talks in Washington.